Monday, June 11, 2007

When you think of social networks you probably think of MySpace. But recently, Facebook has been gaining popularity - since it opened up beyond college users, it has enjoyed a flood of new users, boosted further by the launch of Facebook apps. It’s time these two social networks fought it out.

Round 1: Design

Layout: Facebook wins here because the profiles are well set up and neatly organized and it’s easy to navigate through the profiles to find the info you want. It mainly beats MySpace because most profiles are so ugly and inconsistent.

Overall Site Design: Facebook is obviously the winner here. MySpace looks so unprofessionally done when compared to Facebook, mainly again because of it’s inconsistent design. This time its MySpace themselves, not the users, who make the site difficult to use.

Profiles: This is a tie because MySpace has a lot of customization, but Facebook’s default looks better than MySpace’s and it’s very neat and well organized.

Customization: MySpace and Facebook tie here. While Facebook lets you add and remove applications, MySpace lets you do whatever you want with the pages, if you know a little HTML that is. Unfortunately thats the reason MySpace’s design is so unruly for the most part.

Site Organization: Both site are pretty well organized. However, Facebook wins because of its clean layout that allows you to find everything right away, and it’s start page is a link to everything you need in neat and tidy boxes.Round Winner: Facebook!

Round 2: Media

Pictures: Facebook wins here because of its well-organized picture section and the ability to tag people and have people tag themselves. Also, with the apps recently released you can now add Fiickr and other photosharing site streams to your profile. However, Fox now owns Photobucket, which provides photo hosting to MySpace users.

Videos: This one is a tie because both MySpace and Facebook let you upload video and they both have their own flash player. MySpace will let you embed video into your profile but you can post videos to Facebook as well.

Music: MySpace wins, but only just - we all know that every band ever has a MySpace account . However, with the new Facebook apps you can add your data from music tracking sites like Last.fm and iLike: in fact the top app on Facebook at the moment is the iLike app.

Sharing: Now, Facebook’s advantage here is only a slight one. Facebook allows you to share media links very easily and i fact automatically though the Facebook feed, something that I’m sure many MySpace users would like to be able to do (MySpace News isn’t really suited to this). You can, however, grab embedded media like videos from other profiles to repost on MySpace.

Round Winner: Facebook!

Round 3: Community

Relationships: A big difference on Facebook is that the friends you add are usually your real friends. It’s not a contest like on MySpace where everyone is trying to have the most friends. On Facebook it about talking to the people you know and sharing things with them.

Groups: Both sites have groups, but Facebook makes them more prominent. They are a bigger part of the service and there are a lot of people using them for clever uses like planning meet up and giving info to fans.

Keeping Track of What’s New: Facebook kills MySpace here. On MySpace the only way to know if a friend added something new to their profile is to go look at it, and the only way to know if you made a new friends is to look for the person. Facebook has two feeds. One tells you what’s new with you, like who accepted your friend request or your posted items, etc. The other feed tells you what’s up with all your friends, like who they added and what groups they joined.

Messaging: This is a tie. They both have a place where people can leave messages on your profile and they both have a basic mail system.

Co-Workers: Facebook can be used as a tool to talk to the people you work with also and see what’s new with them. You can even join a network for your company. MySpace was really designed for teens so it doesn’t really have these types of features.

Round Winner: Facebook!

Round 4: Usefulness

Finding Old Friends: One of the major reasons for joining a social network is to reconnect with old friends or classmates. Facebook makes this really easy because the whole site is organized by schools and now by locations too. So unless you forgot your friends name you will probably be able to find them if they have an account. MySpace lets you search for school friends, but doesn’t put the emphasis on real friendships.

Communication:Facebook is a good way to contact people if you don’t know their contact info. Someone is more likely to notice a Facebook message than a MySpace Message due to the fact that there is less Facebook spam.

Promoting Yourself: MySpace wins here. Thousands of bands use MySpace to promote their music and their fans use it to show their support. This isn’t nearly as evident on Facebook, although groups allow companies to promote themselves.

Getting Laid: If you are looking for action, then you’ll probably want to go with MySpace - see our survey for the reasons behind this.

Round Winner: MySpace!

Round 5: Ease of Use

Adding Friends: MySpace wins here because adding new friends and accepting friends requests is usually a one click process. The major advance here over Facebook is the ability to add large amounts of friends at once which for some reason was never added to Facebook.

Search: The winner here is a little bit surprising when you consider Google does the search for the loser. Facebook’s search beats MySpace by a mile. Even though the search engine giant Google is providing MySpace’s search, its results are not nearly as useful as Facebook’s. The big issue here is that MySpace’s search looks in the whole profile, even when just looking for a person, Facebook’s is smart enough to know if you are looking for a user or a movie in someone’s interests.

Navigation: Both MySpace and Facebook have pretty decent navigation, but Facebook beats MySpace when it comes to getting to specific people’s profiles due to its superior search.

Privacy: Facebook makes it really easy to hide info from certain people and to not show information that you want to be kept private. So, if you only want you close friends to see you contact info, it only takes a second. MySpace has privacy too, but it’s far less granular.

Round Winner: Facebook!

An the Winner is… Facebook!!

MySpace was a great social network for a while, but now there are too many spammers and the developers have stopped innovating. Facebook is just starting to become popular (well, popular with those who were not on it when it was limited to schools). So, you might want to check it out, while it’s still cool.